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This was really interesting! You probably already know this, but reading out loud was the norm, and silent reading unusual, for most of history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_reading That didn't really start to change until well after the invention of the printing press.
For most of my life, even now once in a while, I would subvocalize my own inner monologue. Definitely had to learn to suppress that in social situations.
Thank you! I appreciate you sharing that _
My mother is/was very aware of historical practices and I think she often normalized my reading out loud with these types of references as well :)
I've went into a small rabbit hole about Chinese dyslexia after reading your comment where you treated each letter like a drawing instead of a letter, and it turns out that English and Chinese dyslexia probably affect different parts of the brain, and that someone who is dyslexic in alphabet-based systems (English) may not be dyslexic in logograph-based systems (Chinese).
For example, from the University of Michigans's dyslexia help website:
Wai Ting Siok of Hong Kong University has discovered that being dyslexic in Chinese is actually not the same as being dyslexia in English. Her team’s MRI studies showed that dyslexia among users of alphabetic scripts such as English versus users of logographic scripts such as Chinese was associated with different parts of the brain. Chinese reading uses more of a frontal part of the left hemisphere of the brain, whereas English reading uses a posterior part of the brain.
from a linguistics review in 2023:
Converging behavioral evidence suggests that, while phonological and rapid automatized naming deficits are language universal, orthographic and morphological deficits are specific to the linguistic properties of Chinese. At the neural level, hypoactivation in the left superior temporal/inferior frontal regions in dyslexic children across Chinese and alphabetic languages may indicate a shared phonological processing deficit, whereas hyperactivation in the right inferior occipital/middle temporal regions and atypical activation in the left frontal areas in Chinese dyslexic children may indicate a language-specific compensatory strategy for impaired visual-spatial analysis and a morphological deficit in Chinese DD, respectively.
This made me wonder, since written Chinese has no connection with spoken Chinese, did people in ancient China mostly read aloud or read silently when reading by themselves? I'd expect that they didn't read out what they say.
Also, when I read Chinese as a second-language speaker, having learned English before Chinese, I often find that subvocalizing the Chinese characters helps me to understand it, and not doing so makes it difficult for me to read, however my Chinese-native parents don't have an inner voice when reading Chinese.
I think the general differences in language processing between different types of languages is interesting, though I'm not sure how useful this is. Just my ramblings.
Hi, I am from China and learned Chinese as my first language. First, I think people in ancient China mostly read aloud. In China, there is a famous proverb "讀書有三到，謂心到眼到口到”（Reading has three arrivals, that is, the heart, the eye, the mouth）written by Zhu Xi, who lived in Song dynasty. Besides, I have inner voice when reading or writing Chinese( except when I read very fast). Just for reference.
Oh wow, I love this! Thank you for looking in to this and sharing!
It lines up with my intuitions and experience trying to learn Japanese. I found all of it as baffling as any new language I tried to learn except kanji. I noticed I found learning kanji far easier than learning any words in hiragana or katakana (both phonetic instead of pictorial), and also that I found learning kanji easier than most non-dyslectic English speakers I ran in to (I didn't run in to many Dutch speakers)
Classic 'typical mind' like experience: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/baTWMegR42PAsH9qJ/generalizing-from-one-example
On the object level I agree. On the meta level, though, making the seemingly-dumb object-level move (~here specifically) of announcing that you think that all minds are the same in some specific way means that people will come out of the woodwork to correct you, which results in everyone getting better models about what minds are like.
Yeah, that sounds about right. Dutch culture has additionally strong reinforcement of typical mind fallacy cause being "different" in any direction is considered uncomfortable or unsocial, and everyone is encouraged to conform to the norm. There is a lot of reference to how all humans are essentially the same, and you shouldn't think you are somehow different or special. I think I absorbed these values quite a bit, and then applied some motivated cognition to not notice the differences in how I was processing information compared to my peers.
I was diagnosed as a kid. I went through a. lot. of. therapy. Lots of special classes and making two thumbs up then pushing your knuckles together to make a bed that spells bed. That all helped a lot. But three things helped to the point where I hardly think about it these days.
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Minecraft PVP servers. You need to be able to effectively communicate with your team and taunt the enemy. And you need to be able to do it while someone is running at you with a sword.
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Fighting with Antivax people as a teenager on Facebook. The biggest slip up someone could make in a Facebook argument was mixing up “you’re” and “your”
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Talking to girls I liked who could actually spell things correctly. I got very good at rapidly googling how to spell words as I was typing a response.
Thank you for sharing!
Would it be correct to say that the therapy gave you the tools to read and write correctly with effort, and that the bullet point list shows motivations you experienced to actually apply that effort?
Cause my problem was mostly that I didn't know how to even notice the errors I was making, let alone correct for them. Once I knew how to notice them, I was, apparently, highly motivated to do so.
I think it would be correct to say that therapy was effective for my reading. By the end of primary school I could read at a normal level. However, my reading out loud ability seems not to have improved too much since then. I hadn’t realised until just now. But I still have to memorise how to say new words. I can, with a small effort, look at a simple word I have never encountered and pronounce it. Though, the word has to be quite simple. I host trivia as a side gig, and any question with a name that isn’t spelled traditionally trips me up badly. It can be pretty embarrassing trying to say “Sarrah” and not realising it’s just pronounced “Sarah”.
That’s the thing that leads me to think, at least with reading out loud, I have to explicitly memorise a words pronunciation before I can say it. Instead of what I assume others can do, and just look at a word and know how to say it.
In writing, it was necessity and cultural pressure. By the time I was reading out loud alright I was still writing like “i fond how to Mack a YouTube account” “ken i”. That’s a real quote my mother sent me a few weeks ago. When I realised I wasn’t getting what I wanted, (Winning MC battles, Reddit upvotes, winning Facebook wars, girls would comment on my spelling and I didn’t want them to) I would look around at the way others were writing things and cargo cult type copy whatever they were doing. Actually, that’s still what I do.
I don’t think it was high intelligence that caused me to notice these fixes. It took far too long to be intelligence. Instead, I think I’m really competitive and like showing off. Eventually I found methods that got the results I was going for.
I also watched a lot of JacksFilms YGS https://youtu.be/NARxgXEdlzs?si=1rGyQMAnMxQo0x-2
This is really good! Thank you for sharing _ competition drive and wanting to achieve certain things are great motivations, and I think in any learning process the motivation one can tap into is at least as important as the actual learning technique. I'm glad you had access to that.
I tend to feel a little confused about the concept of "intelligence", as I guess my post already illustrated, haha. I think the word as we use it is very imprecise for cases like this. I'd roughly expect people with higher general intelligence to be much faster and successful at finding workarounds for their language processing issues, but I'd also expect the variance in this to be so high as to make plotting your general intelligence against "how quickly did you tame your dyslexia" to not make super much sense.
Then again, I do agree with a comment somewhere else here that Typical Minding is a thing, and my intuitions here may be wrong cause I'm failing to understand what it's like for other minds and I might have overcorrected due to 25 years of incorrectly concluding I was kind of dumb. Lol.
+1 for substituting brain processes. High-g neurodivergents of all flavors tend to run apps in the "wrong" parts of their brain to do things that neutotypicals do automatically. Low-g neurodivergents just fail at the tasks.
In college I was still reading out loud. Research papers have a voice. Mathematical equations especially. They take longer to say out loud than to read in your head, but you can never be sure what’s on the page if you don’t.
This is totally true. I am a professional mathematician, and I also have a strong "mental voice". Whenever I read mathematical texts/research papers with equations inline, I totally read the equations aloud in my head. It makes me wonder to what extent being dyslexic for English (or other written natural languages) fails to co-occur with being dyslexic for math-tongue (as distinct from dyscalculia, with AIUI has to do mostly with disability at mental calculation and mental manipulation of quantitative facts).
Maybe that description was too minimal to help anyone recreate the effect. What you do is you pretend the roman alphabet is a foreign alphabet. E.g. Kanji. Whenever you write or read, trace every stroke of the letter like you are illuminating an ancient manuscript. Channel your inner Sumi-E brush artist. Imagine yourself a true artisan of calligraphy. It’s a bit of a semi-meditative process of noticing every single stroke of every single letter. Yes, this is excruciatingly slow at first. Yes, it will be only kind of slow eventually. But, even better, you can probably still drop this technique at will and then just switch back and forth before high and low error modes of processing languages. Also, you are likely to lower your error rate in fast mode over time cause mental skills are porous. Or maybe magic? Anyway, it does seem to cross-over a bit.
Also, I can read Korean and have had the distinct sensation of it being harder to make myself care about the differences between the characters, very early on; similarly, when practicing Chinese characters in class, I've seen a lot of classmates have a very hard time because they have to suddenly resort to having to treat the characters like they're pictures without even having the mental technology of how to do that correctly, so I wonder how much of dyslexia transfers cross-linguistically! Are there people who can read Cyrillic and Greek, but not Latin script or Hebrew? Who knows!
I wonder how much of dyslexia transfers cross-linguistically
It turns out that quite a bit of it is dependent on the type of language; A person dyslexic in alphabetic languages is not necessarily dyslexic in logographic languages, because they engage different parts of the brain. For example, from this review of Chinese developmental dyslexia:
Converging behavioral evidence suggests that, while phonological and rapid automatized naming deficits are language universal, orthographic and morphological deficits are specific to the linguistic properties of Chinese. At the neural level, hypoactivation in the left superior temporal/inferior frontal regions in dyslexic children across Chinese and alphabetic languages may indicate a shared phonological processing deficit, whereas hyperactivation in the right inferior occipital/middle temporal regions and atypical activation in the left frontal areas in Chinese dyslexic children may indicate a language-specific compensatory strategy for impaired visual-spatial analysis and a morphological deficit in Chinese (developmental dyslexia), respectively.
Interesting! Thank you for sharing! I'd love to know the answer as well.
Anecdotally, I can say that I did try to learn Japanese a little, and I found Kanji far easier to learn than words in hiragana or katakana, cause relating a "picture" to a word seemed far easier for me to parse and remember than to remember "random phonetic encodings". I'm using quotation marks to indicate my internal experience, cause I'm a little mistrustful by now if I'm even understanding how other people parse words and language.
Either way, that anecdote would point to my pictoral->meaning wiring being stronger than my phoneme-encoding->meaning wiring. Which might explain why processing language as drawings helped me. I really have no idea how much this would generalize. But I agree people must run in to this when learning new alphabets.
By the way, as an extremely verbally-fluent nondyslexic person who was also an excellent choral singer, I can confirm the superpowers of singing versus talking. For example:
- I can recite some Maori, Zulu, and a bunch of Hebrew, with only a vague idea what it means (I'm sure I once knew), because of a singing it in a variety of songs. (And like many singers I can recite large tracts of Christian liturgy in Latin; in fact to recite it in English I usually have to translate on the fly from Latin.)
- I memorised about 140 digits of pi just by having Hard 'n' Phirm's Pi Song on in the background and singing it; it took less than a week and almost no effort, if I recall correctly (and however many digits of tau 6.2831853071795864769252867665590 is took literally no effort, that was lodged in my memory after maybe two listens of Vi Hart's Tau and I wasn't even trying).
- Similarly there were some tedious mathematical formulae (the line element for differentiating in spherical polar coordinates, for example) which I "drilled" into my head by making up some nonsense tune for them and then repeating it about three times.
Thoroughly underused technique for minimal effort parroting.
oh huh ... It hadn't occurred to me to use it for memorization. I should try that, considering I think I have subpar memory for non-narrative/non-logical information like strings of numbers. Good point!
Conversely, I think I have above average memory for narrative and logically coherent information like how things work or events that happened in the past. It feels like that type of information has a ton of "hooks" such that I can use one of a dozen of them to recall the entire package, while a string of numbers has no hooks. It's like someone is asking me to repeat white noise. But phone numbers and codes and what not are that. Let alone trying to keep track of numbers on something like a graphics card or processor (I gave up).
Yup. This is how I learned German: found some music I liked and learned to sing it. I haven't learned much Japanese, but there's a bunch of songs I can sing (and know the basic meaning of) even though I couldn't have a basic conversation or use any of those words in other contexts
I was low-key imagining you speaking German like Rammstein and then Japanese like Baby Metal.
My inner comedian not withstanding, that sounds awesome! _
As a fellow slight dyslexic (though probably a different subtype given mine seems to also have a factor of temporal physical coordination) who didn't know until later in life due to self-learning to read very young but struggled badly with new languages or copying math problems from a board or correctly pronouncing words I was letter transposing with - one of the most surprising things was that the anylytical abilities I'd always considered to be my personal superpowers were probably the other side of the coin of those annoyances:
Areas of enhanced ability that are consistently reported as being typical of people with DD include seeing the big picture, both literally and figuratively (e.g., von Károlyi, 2001; Schneps et al., 2012; Schneps, 2014), which involves a greater ability to reason in multiple dimensions (e.g., West, 1997; Eide and Eide, 2011). Eide and Eide (2011) have highlighted additional strengths related to seeing the bigger picture, such as the ability to detect and reason about complex systems, and to see connections between different perspectives and fields of knowledge, including the identification of patterns and analogies. They also observed that individuals with DD appear to have a heightened ability to simulate and make predictions about the future or about the unwitnessed past (Eide and Eide, 2011).
The last line in particular was eyebrow raising given my peak professional success was as a fancy pants futurist.
I also realized that a number of fields are inadvertently self-selecting away from the neurodivergency advantages above, such as degrees in certain eras of history which require multiple ancient language proficiencies, which certainly turned me off to pursuing them academically despite interest in the subject itself.
I remember discussing in an academic history sub I used to extensively partake in how Ramses II's forensic report said he appeared to be a Lybian Berber in relation to the story of Danaus, the mythological Lybian leader who was brother to a pharaoh with 50 sons, and the person argued that Ramses II may have had only 48 sons according to some inscriptions so it was irrelevant (for a story only written down centuries later). It was refreshing to realize that the difference of our perspectives on the matter, and clearly attitudes towards false negatives in general, was likely due to just very different brains.
This is practice sentence to you how my brain. I wonder how noticeable differences are to to other people.
That first sentence looks very bad to me; the second is grammatically correct but feels like it's missing an article. If that's not harder for you to understand than for other people, I still think there's a good chance that it could be harder for other dyslexic people to understand (compared to correct text), because I would not expect that the glitches in two different brains with dyslexia are the same in every detail (that said, I don't really understand what dyslexia means, though my dad and brother say they have dyslexia.)
the same word ... foruthwly and fortunly and forrtunaly
You appear to be identifying the word by its beginning and end only, as if it were visually memorized. Were you trained in phonics/phonetics as a child? (I'm confused why anyone ever thought that whole-word memorization was good, but it is popular in some places.) This particular word does have a stranger-than-usual relationship between spelling and pronunciation, though.
> I can do that too. Thankfully. Unless I don’t recognize the sounds.
My buffer seems shorter on unfamiliar sounds. Maybe one second.
> reading out loud got a little obstructive. I started subvocalizing, and that was definitely less fun.
I always read with an "auditory" voice in my head, and I often move my tongue and voicebox to match the voice (especially if I give color to that voice, e.g. if I make it sound like Donald Trump). I can't can't speed-read but if I read fast enough, the "audio" tends to skip and garble some words, but I still mostly detect the meanings of the sentences. My ability to read fast was acquired slowly through much practice, though. I presume that the "subvocalization" I do is an output from my brain rather than necessary for communication within it. However, some people have noticed that sometimes, after I say something, or when I'm processing what someone has told me, I visibly subvocalize the same phrase again. It's unclear whether this is just a weird habit, or whether it helps me process the meaning of the phrase. (the thing where I repeat my own words to myself seems redundant, as I can detect flaws in my own speech the first time without repetition.)
Really interesting! I particularly liked the part on reading out loud: even though I’d heard it used to be more common (and that there’s even a French 19th c. novelist who had set up a specific ‘shouting room’ in his garden for shouting his texts out loud and see if they sounded good), but I’d never actually noticed it had so many advantages. Maybe I should do it more. Heck, it might even help me stay focused more easily on what I read?
Thanks! :D
Attention is a big part of it for me as well, yes. I feel it's very easy to notice when I skip words when reading out loud, and getting the cadence of a sentence right only works if you have a sense of how it relates to the previous and next one.
Is it not normal to sub vocalise?
Could people react to this comment with a Tick if they do, and a cross if they don’t?
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6To my knowledge I am not dyslexic. If I correctly understand what subvocalizing is (reading via your inner monologue), I do it by default unless I explicitly turn it off. I don't remember how I learned to turn it off, but I remember it was a specific skill I had to learn. And I usually don't turn it off because reading without subvocalizing 1. Takes effort, 2. It's less enjoyable, and 3. Makes it harder for me to understand and retain what I'm reading. I generally only turn it off when I have a specific reason why I have to read quickly, e.g. for a school assignment or reading group that I've run low on time to do.
As I understand it from some cog psych/ linguistics class (it's not my area but this makes sense WRT brain function), the problem with subvocalizing is that it limits your reading speed to approximately the rate you can talk. So most skilled readers have learned to disconnect from subvocalizing. Part of the training for speedreading is to make sure you're not subvocalizing at all, and this helped me learn to speedread.
I turn on subvocalizing sometimes when reading poetry or lyrical prose, or sometimes when I'm reading slowly to make damned sure I understand something, or remember its precise phrasing.
I’ve got a few questions.
- What is “WRT brain function”?
- How does someone train themself out of subvocalising?
- If you think critically, has speed reading actually increased your learning rate for semantic knowledge?
- Most things have downsides, what are the downsides of speed reading?
- What are your Words Per Minute (WPM)?
- Did you test WPM before learning speed reading?
- If this was an RPG, what level do you think you are in speed reading from 1-100?
- How long did it take you to reach your current level in this skill?
Sorry that’s a lot of questions. I’ve been curious about this topic for a while. But the sources I hear it recommended from aren’t ones I completely trust. So it feels like a good opportunity getting to ask a LWer about it.
Quick summary: it's super easy and useful to learn a little speedreading. Just move your finger a bit faster than your eyes are comfortable moving and force yourself to keep up as best you can. Just a little of this can go a long way when combined with a skimming-for-important-bits mindset with nonfiction and academic articles.
Explicit answers:
- With Regard To brain function. It's vague, just this matches my understanding of how the brain works.
- I don't remember. I think it was just a matter of forcing yourself to go faster than you could subvocalize. And to try to notice when you were subvocalizing or not. The core technique in learning speed reading was to move your finger along the lines, and keep going slightly faster. I learned this from the very old book How to Read a Book.
- I'm pretty sure it both a) literally hasn't and more importantly b) effectively has increased my learning rate for semantic knowledge. Fundamentally it doesn't. It doesn't allow you to think faster (or at least not much), so if you're reading complex stuff quickly, you're just not going to understand or remember it. BUT it allows you to quickly skim to find the semantic knowledge you find worth learning and remembering. So your effect rate is higher. Learning to skim is absolutely crucial for academia, and speedreading is very useful for skimming quickly. You sort of get a vague idea of what you're reading, and then spend time on the stuff that might be important.
- That mentioned some of the downsides. It's what you were guessing: you can't really take things in faster, so it's a quantity/quality tradeoff. Here's another manifestation. I rarely bother to speedread fiction, because I can't imagine the setting and action if I do. Come to think of it, maybe I could a bit better if I practiced it more. But I usually just skip ahead or better yet, put the book down if I'm tempted to skim. There are lots of great books to read for pleasure, and if it's not fun word by word and worth imagining, I don't really see the point. But a friend of mine speedreads tons of fiction, so there is a point; he says he also can't imagine it in detail, but I guess he's enjoying taking in the story in broader strokes.
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- I have no idea what my WPM was or is. It's abundantly clear that I learned to read far faster.
- Probably like level 20? Depends if it's a nonlinear curve.
- Here's the interesting bit: it was very, very easy to learn some useful speedreading, just by using my finger to force my eyes to move faster on the page (and maybe some lesser techniques I've now forgotten). I think I probably spent 20 minutes to an hour doing that explictly, then was able to push my reading speed as high as I want. I think with more practice, I could probably take things in and imagine scenes a little better at high speed, but it seemed like diminishing returns, and I'm not the type to just sit and practice skills. To be fair, I spent my childhood reading instead of doing former schooling, so I might've had a deeper skill base to work from.
I'm now going to admit your question made me realize I'm not sure "subvocalize" refers to the same thing for everyone ... I could always read in my head, but the error rate was huge. Only in my early 20s did I switch to a way of reading in my head that also does cadence and voices etc. The latter is what I mean by subvocalizing: The entire richness of an audiobook, generated by my own voice, but just so softly no one else can hear. It's a gradient from normal speech volume, to whisper, to whispering so softly no one can hear, to moving my lips and no sound coming out, to entire subvocalization.
Anyway, my prediction is that non-dyslectics do not subvocalize - it's much too slow. You can't read faster than you speak in that case.
1Anyway, my prediction is that non-dyslectics do not subvocalize - it's much too slow. You can't read faster than you speak in that case.
Maybe I'm just weird, but I totally do sometimes subvocalize, but incredibly quickly. Almost clipped or overlapping to an extent, in a way that can only really work inside your head? And that way it can go faster than you can physically speak. Why should your mental voice be limited by the limits of physical lips, tongue, and glottis, anyway?
2Yeah, I myself subvocalize absolutely everything and I am still horrified when I sometimes try any "fast" reading techniques - those drain all of the enjoyment our of reading for me, as if instead of characters in a story I would imagine them as p-zombies.
For non-fiction, visual-only reading cuts connections to my previous knowledge (as if the text was a wave function entangled to the rest of the universe and by observing every sentence in isolation, I would collapse it to just "one sentence" without further meaning).
I never move my lips or tongue though, I just do the voices (obviously, not just my voice ... imagine reading Dennett without Dennett's delivery, isn't that half of the experience gone? how do other people enjoy reading with most of the beauty missing?).
It's faster then physical speech for me too, usually the same speed as verbal thinking.
Yeah, I myself subvocalize absolutely everything and I am still horrified when I sometimes try any "fast" reading techniques - those drain all of the enjoyment our of reading for me, as if instead of characters in a story I would imagine them as p-zombies.
I speed-read fiction, too. When I do, though, I'll stop for a bit whenever something or someone new is being described, to give myself a moment to picture it in a way that my mind can bring up again as set dressing.
That sounds great! I have to admit that I still get a far richer experience from reading out loud than subvocalizing, and my subvocalizing can't go faster than my speech. So it sounds like you have an upgraded form with more speed and richness, which is great!
Oh, I should probably mention that my weakness is that I cannot remember the stuff well while reading out loud (especially when I focus on pronunciation for the benefit of listeners)... My workaround is to make pauses - it seems the stuff is in working memory and my subconscious can process it if I give it a short moment, and then I can think about it consciously too, but if I would read out loud a whole page, I would have trouble even trying to summarize the content.
Similarly a common trick how to remember names is to repeat the name out loud.. that doesn't seem to improve recall for me very much, I can hear someone's name a lot of times and repeating it to myself doesn't seem to help. Perhaps seeing it written while hearing it might be better, but not sure... By far the best method is when I want to write them a message and I have to scroll around until I see their picture, after that I seem to remember names just fine 😹
Oh interesting! Maybe I'm wrong. I'm more curious about something like a survey on the topic now.
2I was just reading about this, and apparently subvocalizing refers to small but physically detectable movement of the vocal cords. I don't know whether / how often I do this (I am not at all aware of it). But it is literally impossible for me to read (or write) without hearing the words in my inner ear, and I'm not dyslexic (my spelling is quite good and almost none of what's described in OP sounds familiar, so I doubt it's that I'm just undiagnosed). I thought this was more common than not, so I'm kind of shocked that the reacts on this comment's grandparent indicate only about 1/3 (of respondents to the "poll") subvocalize. The voice I hear is quite featureless, and I can read maybe 300 words per minute, which I think is actually faster than average, though needing to "hear" the words does impose an upper bound on reading speed.
The LessWrong Review runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2025. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year.
Hopefully, the review is better than karma at judging enduring value. If we have accurate prediction markets on the review results, maybe we can have better incentives on LessWrong today. Will this post make the top fifty?
The curious tale of how I mistook my dyslexia for stupidity - and talked, sang, and drew my way out of it.
Sometimes I tell people I’m dyslexic and they don’t believe me. I love to read, I can mostly write without error, and I’m fluent in more than one language.
Also, I don’t actually technically know if I’m dyslectic cause I was never diagnosed. Instead I thought I was pretty dumb but if I worked really hard no one would notice. Later I felt inordinately angry about why anyone could possibly care about the exact order of letters when the gist is perfectly clear even if if if I right liike tis.
I mean, clear to me anyway.
I was 25 before it dawned on me that all the tricks I was using were not remotely related to how other people process language. One of my friends of six years was specialized in dyslexia, and I contacted her, full excitement about my latest insight.
“Man, guess what? I realized I am dyslectic! This explains so much! I wish someone had told me sooner. It would have saved me so much grief.”
“Oh, yeah, I know.”
“Wait, what?”
“You are very obviously dyslectic.”
“Wait, why didn’t you tell me?”
“You didn’t seem bothered.”
“Oh…”
Turns out my dyslexia was a public secret that dated back all the way to my childhood (and this was obviously unrelated to my constitutional lack of self-awareness).
Anyway.
How come I kind of did fine? I’m fluent in English (not my native language), wrote my PhD thesis of 150 pages in 3 months without much effort, and was a localization tester for Dutch-English video game translation for two years.
I also read out loud till the age of 21, trace every letter like it’s a drawing, and need to sing new word sounds to be able to remember them.
I thought everyone had to but no one sent me the memo.
Dear reader, not everyone has to.
When I recently shared my information processing techniques with old and new friends, they asked if I had ever written them down so maybe other people could use them too.
I hadn’t.
So here is my arsenal of alternative information processing techniques.
Read Out Loud
Honestly, I didn’t realize there was an age where you were supposed to stop doing this. In school you obviously had to whisper to yourself. At home you go to your room and read at normal volume. If it’s a fiction book, you do voices for the different characters. It’s great.
I remember my sister sometimes walking in to my room when I was little cause she said it sounded like so much fun in there. It totally was.
Later I found out my mother made sure my siblings never made me aware it was unusual I was still reading out loud. Instead she signed me up for competitions to read books on the local radio. This was before the wide-spread internet and audio books. Later I’d read to my parents sometimes, who were always excited about how much energy I threw into the endeavor.
I didn’t know any different.
In college I was still reading out loud. Research papers have a voice. Mathematical equations especially. They take longer to say out loud than to read in your head, but you can never be sure what’s on the page if you don’t.
According to my brain anyway.
When I was 22 I moved in with my first boyfriend and reading out loud got a little obstructive. I started subvocalizing, and that was definitely less fun. I still subvocalize now. But if I struggle to follow a passage, I go back to reading it out loud.
I’ve probably read out this essay a dozen times by now. I keep checking the cadence of every sentence. It’s easier to spot word duplications, cause I find myself repeating myself. Missing words also stick out like inverted pot holes. They destroy the flow. So I jump back and smooth them over. Sometimes when I talk, I finish the sentence differently than it’s written. Then I go back and compare the two. Often what I say is better than what I wrote.
I’ve been told most people’s brains don’t work like that. All I can say is, I hope more kids get a chance to grow in to adults who keep reading out loud if that is what they need and enjoy.
Draw the Letters
The year before high school graduation I decided I wanted to get a 7.5 grade average (out of 10). In the Dutch school system, that’s kind of high, and it allows you automatic entry to any program of your choice. I studied hard, and diligently, and generally enjoyed it.
Except I still failed every language I hadn’t managed to drop.
My first fail grade was French, everybody breezed through German (Dutch with an accent) except me, and then there was mandatory Latin - an entirely logical life decision for a dyslectic. I managed to drop French and German. I could breeze through English cause I spoke it better than the teacher (thanks, Dad![1]) but with Dutch and Latin I was stuck.
Now when it came to spelling Dutch words, I could not for the life me remember the rules or see the individual letters making up a word. I’d just be reading or writing, and it’s like little packages of word shape went in or out of my brain, but I couldn’t really see in to those packages. Write and right are the same word. So are father and dad. So are foruthwly and fortunly and forrtunaly. And that’s not even getting in to reading a sentence and managing to notice all the words. My brain automagically skips along a sentence kind of like:
This is practice sentence to you how my brain. I wonder how noticeable differences are to to other people.
I didn’t find it baffling that my brain worked like this. I found it baffling other people cared to give me fail grades about it! I was pretty sure I was intelligible. And with my Reading Out Loud trick (that I didn’t know was a trick) I could read just fine.
In the mean time I was failing my Dutch exams three times in a row. The teacher made an exam you had to pass to be allowed into the next year. It was entirely a spelling exam. I was sure she had invented this inane rule to torture me personally.
Luckily I didn’t invent my solution till the year after. Shows her who’s boss![2]
Ahum. Anyway.
I kept banging my eyeballs against the teflon of word images. I could not get any of it to stick. Till, for whatever reason, I realized words were just drawings. Drawings made up of letters. And letters were also drawings. I really liked drawings. I had always liked drawings.
What if I pretended to draw every single letter as I wrote it?
You know those magic spells in books where suddenly you get an extra sense or you look through the invisibility cloak? It was kind of like that. (I just apparently spelled “cloak” like “cloaca”. Have I mentioned I was often the class joker cause I read and heard everything wrong and my first 5 guesses were completely bonkers? I wonder if there is a dyslexia/creativity link purely because of that).
Anyway, long story short, I was immediately cured of my writing dyslexia.[3] Yay!
Sing the Words
My first boyfriend was Swedish. His English was great and so was mine, so really there was no reason to strive for anything more. But I had some desire to be able to communicate better with his family so I did end up facing my well known demon again: foreign language learning.
Every time he said a word in Swedish I just … didn’t remember it? Humans are supposed to have an auditory loop of a few seconds - You don’t have to memorize or pay attention to what you hear. You can just repeat the last few seconds back. It’s standard functionality.
I can do that too. Thankfully.
Unless I don’t recognize the sounds. It’s like asking me to beatbox the last 5 seconds of the gurgling of a nearby river. How the fudge would I do that?
Wait, are there people who can do that?
Anyway.
It was making me feel mighty stupid though. I had been in enough
self-flaggelationlanguage learning courses to know no one else seemed afflicted by this micro-amnesia pointed exactly at the new word they were trying to learn. Also, this was not an issue for me for new words in a language I did know, nor was it an issue with new words in languages I didn’t know where the sounds were familiar (I went through 5 years of trying to learn Spanish prior to this, much to the confusion of anyone who knew me, but Spanish doesn’t contain new phonemes compared to Dutch).Again, I don’t know why I thought of this. My best guess is, I like experimenting. But at some point, I asked my then-boyfriend to sing the word to me that he had repeated to me roughly 30 times before that without effect.
Yes. I got it the first time. And it reproduced. I could remember the word sounds first from singing, and then after a few repetitions, I could just say them. Hurray!
Substituting brain processes
This was more a personal account than a course on how to manage dyslexia. I never got help or training. I have no idea how common my techniques are. But my friends pointed out I should share them so others can find them and use them, so here you go.
There is, to my mind, one common thread though: If your brain is bad at doing something the regular way, try something else. Anything else. Human brains have areas dedicated to language processing - encoding and decoding. Dyslexia covers all the ways that these encodings and decodings might fail. If you notice your default setup not working, try using a different mechanism instead. I think in practice, I’ve covered my major dyslexias in word image processing and phoneme processing by using my verbal center, my visual center (not language related), and the apparently highly specialized area of your brain that takes care of singing.
They are not supposed to take care of reading, writing, and learning word sounds. But they can apparently do the job using their own toolkit. I’m slower at all the language related tasks than you’d expect for my overall mental functioning, but these techniques allow me to do the job without error.
And I can tell you, being trapped in never being able to reliably parse the true information that is written down or said is a weird and maddening curse. It’s hard to explain if you don’t have any dyslectic tendencies. I used to think I was stupid. Turns out I’m just a special form of deaf and blind. I wish someone had told me how to deal with that. So for what it’s worth, if your brain is anything like mine, maybe try to talk, sing, or draw your way out of it.
This was a cross-post of my first essay on my new blog Think Feel Play. Consider subscribing there if you liked this post, and would like to read future essays about learning, learning about learning, and learning about learning about learning ... ok. Yes. Hi. Or maybe just to make me smile :D
My father is American, and I’ve spoken some English for as long as I can remember. I can’t recall ever having to put in effort in to learning English. Something I remain eternally grateful for considering my dismal language acquisition skills.
I can’t remember how I made it through. I only remember how miserable and angry I was, as the only student in my year who had to keep redoing the exam. I think I got infinite redoes? Got lucky? Was proffered divine grace?
Maybe that description was too minimal to help anyone recreate the effect. What you do is you pretend the roman alphabet is a foreign alphabet. E.g. Kanji. Whenever you write or read, trace every stroke of the letter like you are illuminating an ancient manuscript. Channel your inner Sumi-E brush artist. Imagine yourself a true artisan of calligraphy. It’s a bit of a semi-meditative process of noticing every single stroke of every single letter. Yes, this is excruciatingly slow at first. Yes, it will be only kind of slow eventually. But, even better, you can probably still drop this technique at will and then just switch back and forth between high and low error modes of processing languages. Also, you are likely to lower your error rate in fast mode over time cause mental skills are porous. Or maybe magic? Anyway, it does seem to cross-over a bit.